Liminal Lives

Susan Merrill Squier is Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English at The Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology; editor of Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (published by Duke University Press); and coeditor of Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction and Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation. She is past president and Executive Board Member of the Society for Literature and Science.

• List of Illustrations xiAcknowledgments xiiiIntroduction: Networking Liminality 11. The Uses of Literature for Feminist Science Studies: Tracing Liminal Lives 252. The Cultured Cell: Life and Death at Strangeways 583. The Hybrid Embryo and Xenogenic Desire 894. Giant Babies: Graphing Growth in the Early Twentieth Century 1125. Incubabies and Rejuvenates: The Traffic between Technologies of Reproduction and Age Extension 1466. Transplant Medicine and Transformative Narrative 1687. Liminal Performances of Aging: From Replacement to Regeneration 214Coda: The Pluripotent Discourse of Stem Cells: Liminality, Reflexivity, and Literature 253Notes 281Works Cited 315Index 335

“Liminal Lives offers very strong and important theoretical insights into relationships between scientific knowledge and practice and literary production. Its innovative methodology creates possibilities for better communication and exchange between scientific, literary, and social scientific knowledge in a way that will be very useful to others interested in interdisciplinary science studies.”-Catherine Waldby, author of AIDS and The Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference “A brilliant and provocative exploration of how biomedicine and literature, particularly science fiction, are together reconfiguring the very shape of the entire life span, producing adoptable embryos, giant babies, interspecies pregnancies, and regenerated old bodies-all in the context of a new and grim bio-economy in which hearts and kidneys are for sale and earrings are fabricated out of fetal remains.”-Kathleen Woodward, author of Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions “Susan Merrill Squier’s Liminal Lives is compelling, timely, imaginative, and wonderfully provocative.”-Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form